This application relates generally to the field of market analysis. More specifically, the application relates to methods and systems for developing market intelligence for businesses having multiple representative locations.
Companies and organizations that provide goods and/or services continually seek to achieve a competitive advantage for their products in the marketplace. It has long been recognized that one way in which such a competitive advantage may be achieved is through a superior understanding of the dynamics of the marketplace. Such market intelligence may be used by a business to understand the level and scope of demand for its products, as well as the distribution of its representatives and of its competitors' representatives in seeking to exploit that demand. One common method of developing market intelligence uses a painstaking application of survey techniques, sometimes coupled with more sophisticated demographic modeling.
Such survey tools are successful for certain types of organizations, but are generally not well suited for other types of organizations. For example, in some industries the number of representatives that a given business employs is large and geographically disperse, as is the number of representatives employed by each of its competitors. Indeed, such geographical dispersion is in some instances a significant component of the product supplied by the business. One example is provided by the courier industry, in which each courier provider has a large number of representative locations distributed over a large geographic area. Moreover, the service levels provided by the representative locations may be widely different, with a small number of full-service representatives and a larger number of limited-service representatives. In such an instance, survey tools fail easily to provide information regarding the distribution of competitor locations and to correlate that information with demand for the service.
Other examples of industries for which such information is not readily available include financial-services industries, which may be provided at diverse types of locations and establishments. The money-order industry provides a useful example since a consumer who wishes to purchase a money order has a wide spectrum of options: she may use a bank or other financial institution, may use a money-order service at a convenience store, or may use a postal money-order service, among other options. A competitive advantage would result to an organization that had a better understanding not only of how its representative locations are distributed but also how its competitor's representative locations are distributed. Such information would permit the organization to determine whether a given geographical area had been saturated so that its own representatives were cannibalizing business from other of its representatives, or to determine that the area is underserved so that it would be beneficial to add another representative.